| | Osamu Fujimura, 藤村靖 (b.August 29, 1927 in Tôkyô, d. March 13, 2017 in Waikoloa Beach, Hawaii). The Fujimura family is from the Genzi 源氏 family, remotely related to the Samurai family, Minamoto Yoritomo源頼朝, who founded the Kamakura Bakuhu (military government site) as a Syôgun将軍 in the 12th century; his grave is behind the Hachimangu八幡宮 near Osamu and his wife Catita’s house in Yukinosita, Kamakura.
Osamu is survived by his wife J.C. Williams, and their two sons, Andrew Fujimura and Nicholas Itaru Fujimura, and by his two sons, Akira and Makoto Fujimura from his first marriage.
Osamu received his, D.Sc in Physics from the University of Tôkyô in 1962. His first position was Research Assistant at The Kobayashi Institute of Physical Research, Kokubunzi, Tôkyô from 1952 – 1958; then an Assistant Professor, Research Laboratory of Communication Science, University of Electrocommunications, Tyôhu, Tôkyô from 1958 – 1965. From 1958 - 1961 he was a DSR (Division of Sponsored Research) Research Staff Member, at the Research Laboratory of Electronics (Speech Communication Group), MIT, where he had the opportunity to be supervised by Drs. Morris Halle and K. N. Stevens. This was followed by two years (1963 – 1965)as a Guest Researcher, at the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden, where he was supervised by Dr. Gunnar Fant. During this time, he conducted research that contributed to the foundation of modern acoustic analyses.
He returned to Japan as Professor and Director to head up the new Research Institute of Logopedics and Phoniatric (RILP)), Faculty of Medicine, University of Tôkyô (1965 – 1973). Concurrently, he also was Adjunct Professor, Dept. of Linguistics, Faculty of Letters, University of Tôkyô, and also Chair of the Graduate Course in Physiology (in Division of Medicine), University of Tôkyô, (1973). It was during this time that RILP became an active research center for speech science studies, focusing on developing highly advanced techniques and tools for studying articulation of speech, including fiberoptics, EMG (electromyography) and the X-Ray Microbeam. Some studies conducted at RILP during this time are considered to be foundational to modern phonetics science, and still cited in the current phonetics papers.
In 1973, Osamu became probably the first professor to ever voluntarily leave the University of Tôkyô, when he chose to move to the U.S. to become a member of the Technical Staff, and later Department Head at AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ. (Linguistics and Speech Analysis Research, 1973-1984, Linguistics and Artificial Intelligence Research, 1984-1987, and Department of Artificial Intelligence Research, 1987-1988). It was during this time that Osamu worked with a number of scientists, and is remembered for encouraging a large number of young speech scientists, including Mark Liberman, Janet Pierrehumbert, Mary Beckman, Marian Macchi, Sue Hertz, Jan Edwards, Julia Hirschberg, to name a few. We have heard from people like John McCarthy, a formal phonologist, and Barbara Partee, a formal semanticist, that Osamu took care of them well as post-doc researchers at Bell Labs, indicating that he had a broad vision about the whole field of linguistics.
When the speech department at Bell Labs closed down, Osamu moved to Columbus, Ohio in 1988, where he became Professor, Dept. Speech & Hearing Science, The Ohio State University (OSU). He continued to teach and conduct research until he retired as Professor Emeritus in 2003. It was during this time that Fujimura began to formulate the C/D model. He mentored a number of researchers during this time, including Reiner Wilhelms Tricarico, Chao-Min Wu, Donna Erickson, Kerrie Beechler Obert, Caroline Menezez, Bryan Pardo, to name a few. During this time at OSU, he was also a Member at the Center for Cognitive Science (1988 – 2003), and a Participating Professor, Biomedical Engineering Center (1992 – 2003). In addition he was a periodic Guest Researcher at ATR/HIP, Japan during the period of 1992 – 1996. From 1997 - 1998 he had Sabbatical Leave from OSU to be at JSPS (Japan Society for the Promotion of Science) Invitation Fellow at the Research Institute of Asian and African Languages and Cultures, Tôkyô University for Foreign Studies, Tôkyô, Japan. After retirement from OSU, he was a researcher at the Center of Excellence (COE), Nagoya University (Prof. K. Kakehi & F. Itakura) from 2003 – 2004, and this was followed by a position as a Fellow at the International Institute for Advanced Studies, Kyôto, Japan from April 2004 – August 2006.
Osamu’s career as a scientist spanned about three quarters of a century.He authored (co-author or editor) over 256 scientific writings covering a vast range of topics including physics, speech acoustics and articulation, phonology, kanji transcription methods, syntax, and even more. These include 11 books and monographs, 64 journal articles, 58 articles or chapters in books, 56 proceedings articles, 42 miscellaneous writings and 25 articles in RILP. Just a glance at the early lab reports from RILP will demonstrate the breadth of research he did himself and what he supported.
It is difficult to name the most important things Osamu did. As a researcher, he collaborated with colleagues to introduce X-ray technologies to study human articulation patterns, with the X-ray microbeam speech corpus still considered to be an important research resource for modern phonetic research. He is also known for his work that contributed to the foundation of modern acoustic analyses of speech sounds, especially the acoustics of nasal consonants, proposing the notion of “anti-formant”. In addition to his contribution to phonetic science, he wrote a review of “Syntactic Structures” by Noam Chomsky in Japanese in 1963, thereby contributing to introducing generative linguistics in Japan. He also developed a model of speech articulation, called “the C/D model”, in which phonological featural specifications are “Converted” and “Distributed” to several articulators. It is an explicit theory of how mental, phonological information is mapped onto actual physiological articulatory commands. This theory is pursued by a number of current researchers in phonetics.
However, perhaps more than what Osamu actually did as a scientist, is how he encouraged others in his research labs and beyond, especially young researchers, both men and women, to observe data, ask questions, think about how to interpret and organize their observations, and then to cheer them on as they became independent researchers, contributing in their own right to the field of speech science.
We like to think of Osamu's commitment to especially young researchers as “pay-it-forward”. May we, as we remember Osamu, be willing to share time, energy, expertise, mentoring, etc. with the up and coming younger generation.
Thank you, Osamu. And, thank you, for your smile. |
